The Eternal Life and Art of Maxwell Ardeen

Bioart emerges where biological science, technology, and aesthetics collide. For one terminally ill artist, it offered a chance at immortality.

The earliest painters worked as both chemists and materials scientists, discovering ways to combine natural pigments with fatty binders to yield vibrant paints. Renaissance painters moonlighted — quite literally — as anatomists. Leonardo da Vinci famously dissected some 30 corpses, in large part to aid in writing a treatise on painting, eventually compiling an understanding of human anatomy unequalled in his time. Da Vinci would not have conceptualized there being any distinction between these two projects.

The inheritors of such a worldview, the artist-researchers of The Tissue Culture and Art Project began exploring the artistic applications of tissue engineering in 1996. They saw their mission as “a pioneering collaboration that explores how tissue engineering can be used as a medium for artistic expression.” By 2003, collaborators had cultivated frog meat grown from cells, preceding the scientific and market interests in cultured meats. A decade passed before, in 2013, scientist Mark Post would famously create and consume a burger grown from stem cells.

Art and technology often intersect in this way: a brush, a chisel, a 3D printer, DNA encoded with the image of a Germanic Rune, a biocompatible implant that induced the growth of an ear on a forearm, a bioprinter, CRISPR editing that induces pigmentation in bacteria. 

No other artistic field showcases these intersections more vibrantly and impactfully than bioart, where cutting-edge biological tools are turned towards the aesthetic, the cultural, and even the numinous.

And no artist better embodied this field than Maxwell Ardeen. In 2060, Ardeen was diagnosed with an undisclosed terminal illness. The threat of death, which he described as Damoclesean, produced the most intense, prolific, and celebrated era of this late artist's career.

Transdifferentiation, 2061

Ardeen’s first exhibit post-diagnosis was widely recognized as the beginning of his “terminal era.” In it, a small embryonic clone of the artist was genetically spliced with genes from the turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish using CRISPR-Cas9 technology. This “immortal” jellyfish engages in a phenomenon known as reverse development. Upon encountering environmental and cellular stressors that would normally result in death, starvation, or senescence, it can revert to its pre-polyp cyst stage, growing into a genetically identical adult once more.

Ardeen implanted his embryonic clone into an artificial womb, magnified, and displayed on a 7’ x 7’ square LED television. The edges of the womb were lined with needles that penetrated the embryo once it reached the equivalent of 8 weeks of gestation, 1 week before achieving its fetal stage. These pinpricks triggered a cascade of molecular signals, causing it to revert to its germinal stage and begin the process of development once again.

Audiences received Transdifferentiation with both rapturous praise and raucous protest. Concerned members of the public argued that the exhibit amounted to little more than the torture of a sentient or pre-sentient being. Yet, art critics called the piece “epochal,”¹ with one extolling its “exploration of a pre-life groping toward eternity,” lauding it as “nothing less than the single greatest work of the 21st century.”²

Chimera, 2063

This piece first appeared in billionaire Bri Asher’s Art for the Transhumanist Future exhibit. Ardeen presented it alongside several “upcycled” former projects, one a series of decomposing animal carcasses infected with zoonotic bacteria engineered to make colorful pigments while consuming dead or dying materials.

In Chimera, the artist used a 3D extrusion bioprinter and an electrospinning technique he developed in graduate school to produce a set of various animal organs, which he then placed in chambers. Labelled with both their organ type and species, they lined the perimeter of a room roughly 15 feet in diameter and connected via a tangled and complex panoply of machines, tubes, and wires, approximating an intoxicated spider’s web. 

Synthetic blood, made from cultured red blood cells, was pumped through and between the organs by means of normothermic machine perfusion. The lungs of a black bear expanded and contracted, aiding in the oxidation of the fluid, which circulated throughout the rest of the exhibit, aided by both the artist’s machines and an elephant’s heart. The fluid filtered through human kidneys and a urine replacement system designed by the artist. 

The complex array of temperature controls, oxygenation chambers, pressure nozzles, and drainage systems cohered in aggressive harmony, all leading to the center of the room where a mass of boneless flesh sat: an ever-growing cancerous tumor. Having created a crude but potentially life-sustaining organ system, Ardeen chose to devote it to the expansion of an entropic, life-abating mass. To this day, the source of the tumor has never been confirmed, though many believe it to have been excised from the artist’s own cancer.

And again, and again, and again, 2064

One year after Chimera, Ardeen produced this kinesthetic sculpture, read at the time as a study on brain-robot-interfaces and the futility of mechanical replications of life. More robotics-focused than his previous works, in this piece, two busts opposed one another: one featureless; the other an immaculate reconstruction of Ardeen himself, composed of a sculptural material the artist grew from his own cells. A large, fully articulated robotic arm extended from the base of each head. Several medical tools and devices occupied the space between the busts. 

When the exhibit was first unveiled, the arm connected to Ardeen’s bust moved first. Grabbing a scalpel, it plunged into its face, slicing and slowly pulling the reconstruction apart, leaving the skin in a pile beneath the bust. The robotic arm then removed the top of its faceless metallic head, revealing a bioreactor with a pea-sized tangle of neurons swimming inside. This bioreactor was lifted out of its skull and placed inside the bust opposite. After a long pause in which neither machine moved, the second robotic arm, connected to the now-filled bust, delicately took the “skin” from the opposite bust’s base and sculpted Ardeen’s features on itself. Once finished, the process began again. 

While original viewers could only speculate as to the contents of the small cluster of neurons that passed from bust to bust, with the benefit of Ardeen’s extensive notes, we now can verify their origin. 

Ardeen spent a year mapping his neural activity using a MICrONS neural-scape helmet, adapted from its 2025 mouse project, and custom viral transneuronal tracers encoded to mark the motor cortex pathways of his arms, hands, and fingers. Using this helmet, he recorded himself for over 3,000 hours constructing and deconstructing his face. In this way, he assembled enough data to print a small “brain” containing the required neuronal pathways and signal patterns.

These neurons, housed in the bioreactor, connected to the robotic arms via a parallel brain-machine interface. The interface provided haptic procedural feedback (i.e., when to start and stop a task) to the neurons based on haptic sensations from the robotic limbs.

The sculpture was meant to be perpetual. Some now see this as Ardeen's first, earnest attempt to create an eternal life for himself, even though, over the years since its initial exhibition, substantial data loss has appeared in the facial reconstruction stages, deforming the once-accurate simulacra of his visage. Given the direction of Ardeen's later work, some art critics speculate that he anticipated such deformation and that it was intentional.

Entombed, Transformed, Revived, 2065

Sometime around 2064, Ardeen began engaging more regularly with the public, attending seminars, speaking at universities, and even bringing his bioart into virtual-reality daily-show environments. This dialogue, particularly questions from his audience about the value of extending human life, motivated this sculptural installation.

Roughly the size of Ardeen and resembling a human body, it comprised six distinct chambers. The head, the torso, and each arm and leg communicated as did the organs in Chimera. Each was given its own perfusion-pump system to create something evocative of a magician's trick: a single body dismembered into six boxes.

Each applied a different life-extension technique. The body’s natural aging process was then induced and intensified a thousandfold.

The right arm received a next-generation improvement of a drug which combined metformin with rapamycin, medications thought to extend, though not infinitely, the life and health of its recipients. While the right arm aged more slowly than expected, it still showed noticeable decline, such as a loss of muscle mass and osteoporosis, which conformed with TAME3 findings released earlier that decade. 

The left arm received a gene-therapy treatment, originally designed to treat muscular degenerative diseases, introducing exogenous follistatin, a protein that inhibited myostatin and encourages muscle growth. While this arm also initially showed slowed signs of aging, it succumbed around month three of the installation, with liver spots, sagging skin, and contortion of the arm.

The right leg was treated with a suite of telomerase activator drugs, enzymes that slowed down and, in some cases, even reversed telomere shortening. Unregulated telomerase activators induced rapid, unregulated cell growth, and tumors soon overcame the limb. 

The left leg was cryogenically frozen, using early 21st-century techniques as a nod to former and failed attempts at eternal life. The effects were unimpressive, as while the appearance of the limb remained mostly unchanged, a small screen on the chamber displayed the microscopic destruction taking place inside: cell-rupture, osmotic stress, and cryoprotectant toxicity syndrome left a field of dead cells beneath its seemingly placid surface. 

The torso was treated with a partial programming gene therapy. This therapy delivered several Yamanaka factors, which restored parts of the torso’s epigenome and cellular function degraded by age. The use of this therapy, at this point only authorized in the United States for compassionate use trials for specific, degenerative diseases, was legally allowed in this sculpture due to its “nonliving nature.” While results from several longitudinal studies showed great promise for use in the general population, ethical concerns focused on equitable distribution of anti-aging technology and laws, such as The Life for All or None Act of 2045, kept it off the market.

The head was left to age without intervention. 

The result, taken collectively, was striking. At its debut, the body was highly congruent, each part approximately as old as every other. However, shortly after its unveiling, it grew more collage-like, with an ancient, soon-to-be rotting face, one limb a little younger and the other much younger still, one leg a twisted suggestion of a limb and the other freezer-burnt, and at the center of it all a perfect, unaged torso.

Future recreations of this work, once the original materials were sufficiently aged and desiccated, took a simpler approach. A body was left to age, while a small surgical bot performed routine aesthetic de-aging procedures on the face. 

If one were to look at these results next to one another, Ardeen suggested, our need to stop aging and cure death would be self-evident. Would you tell an aging face it should content itself with its lot? Or tell a body it should age and wither while its face remained youthful? This artwork screamed no.

Eichenbaum’s Fever Dream, 2066

A departure from the purely physical nature of his early work, Eichenbaum’s Fever Dream marked Ardeen's first earnest entry into the world of mixed virtual-biological experiences. It was named after the scientist who first coined and widely popularized the concept of “time cells” in the hippocampus.

Viewers were asked to sit and place a large, helmet-like device over their heads. Electromagnetic signals then passed through their brain, targeting the lateral entorhinal cortex, the primary area of the hippocampus responsible for encoding our sequential experiences of time. Through a complex series of trial and error, and in collaboration with engineers at Opta, the technology company founded by Stanford dropout Everett Rousseaux, the helmet effectively dilated the viewer’s experience of time.

Clad in the helmet, awestruck viewers spent 18 hours watching a simulated evolution, projected at 1,000 times “normal” speed. Deep on the seafloor, hydrothermal vents spat plumes of superheated water into the surrounding ocean. Extremophilic archaea fed on the hydrogen expelled from the vent, converting it into energy and methane. Programmed algorithms stimulate the jump from archaea to eukaryotes. And as programmed environmental stressors and material availability shifted, viewers watched the species increase their reproductive capacity during times of hydrothermal abundance, eventually coalescing multicellular organisms, and then into a thriving colony of tubular worms waving from the “smokestack” sediment chimneys that had formed above the vents.

Finally, as the piece drew to a close, a tectonic shift in the plates collapsed the vents. The plumes disappeared, and the worms withered until nothing remained but a cold, dark seabed. Visitors removed their helmets to find that less than a single minute had passed in the gallery. Many reported weeping as they mourned an entire species laid waste by an accident of geology.

Though in the decades since this work’s release, many schools, work environments, and research employ dilated virtual environments, preliminary research has suggested that the technology may cause early-onset neurological aging. This has led global health organizations to recommend limiting the amount of dilated time consumed annually, and now Eichenbaum’s Fever Dream requires extensive waivers to view.

Eichenbaum’s Fever Dream marked an artistic evolution for Ardeen, a journey inward, into the intricacies of time rather than raw attacks at the process of aging itself. Who cares if the material body degrades in a hundred years if one can access epochal time?

The End. The Beginning. The End Again. 2070

Ardeen’s final piece was a literal black box, four feet wide, two feet deep, and seven feet tall. Unveiled at the New York Museum of Bioart, it is now housed in a warehouse owned by Ardeen’s trust, with instructions that it be placed on the museum floor again in 2170. A curtain was dropped from the box in the center of the gallery floor, and Ardeen, emaciated and, by all accounts, dying, slowly walked from the audience to the box.

With a hiss, a small door opened, and Ardeen stepped inside. Before anyone could move, the door slid shut. Projected onto the outside of the black box, a timer began the countdown from 3,156,000,000 seconds. In 100 years, Ardeen’s final creation will open. Who, or what, will be inside remains a mystery. Many believe he has merely created an elaborate tomb. Those closest to him, however, believe that we will find something very different, though what it is remains debated and unknowable, for now.

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Cite: Nitkey S. “The Eternal Life and Art of Maxwell Ardeen.” Asimov Press (2025). https://doi.org/10.62211/28he-13uu

Animated header by Ella Watkins-Dulaney.

1. Linkert, Hanna. “Ardeen’s Artistic Sea Change: Evolving Bioart in the 21st Century.” Journal of Art in America. (September 2072).

2.  Gottman, Phillip. “Maxwell Ardeen Makes the Future.” Artforum. Vol 110 no. 9 (March 2071).